Successful companies in all industries know how important it is to keep manufacturing processes lean and cost efficient, while also keeping overall operations running as smoothly as possible. But there are times when companies should “shake things up” a little bit… Whatever industry you’re in, vibration testing can play an important role in your company’s success by determining how your company’s products will function in real-world settings where vibrations and unexpected shaking are common.

Products may vibrate during daily use, such as car parts subjected to vibrations from road travel, food containers shaken during normal handling, and jet engines humming back and forth across the country in one day. Additionally, products and the packaging they are contained in may be subjected to vibrations during road, rail, or air transport. Do you know how your products will stand up against the shaking and vibrations they may encounter in the real world? Vibration testing can help you determine the answer to this question.

Vibration testing involves “shaking” a product on a table or posts to see how the product is affected, or if it’s affected at all. Used in just about every industry, vibration testing offers many benefits and advantages for manufacturers, including:

Assistance with initial product design

Protection of a brand/product’s image

Reduction of warranty costs

Maintenance of product reliability

Guarantees product integrity and safety during shipping.

Products can be shaken on one axis or on multiple axis – up to three axis at the same time. Testing a product on three axis at the same time is the best way to test the cumulative effect of real world vibrations.

Here’s a partial list of industries currently using 3-axis vibrational testing very effectively:

Over the past few years, many companies have introduced specialized testing equipment, especially in Japan. As world leaders in precision measuring, our specialized testers are backed by years of experience and our use of highly accurate and precise vibration measurement and vibration creation equipment that utilize our custom electric servo motor actuators. First used in our torsion and tensile testers, we later created a new version of them for specifically for our shaker equipment (including our latest High G shaker). Taking our past experience and success, we’ve taken further evolutions using our electric servo actuators for even a broader range of testing and are seeing results unprecedented in our industry.

When testing automotive components such as transmissions using our actuators, momentary accelerations that normally occur when the transmission is connected to an actual engine can be accurately simulated. Attempts in the past utilizing regular electric motors or other mechanisms did not allow for these moments to be transmitted to the transmission and therefore the testing was not adequate and premature failures occurred. Our specialized actuators can put forth a micro burst, very fast, high-frequency vibrations high accelerations/decelerations that mimic what an engine actually does, without having to actually use an engine and deal with all of the issues that trying to use an actual engine can introduce, such as noise, exhaust, etc. With our technology, the tester gets an engine simulation with the added benefits of programmability that comes from using an electric actuator instead of an actual engine. This is just one latest example of the capability of this technology.

Another example is our multi-access steering tester. Using our electric servo actuators, we combined our torsion testers with servo technology to not only actuate the steering mechanism but also induce vibration at the hub. By using this technology we can control movements and vibrations with precision that cannot be matched by hydraulic methods. The steering tester is used in the lab to actuate the steering mechanism as if turning the wheel, while the hub area will vibrate from programmable inputs, such as road vibrations, tire uniformity and unbalance and even some road events such as hitting potholes. This is yet another example of the highly specialized equipment using this technology that can be uniquely tailored to our customers’ particular use. Any automotive testing equipment can benefit from this advanced technology that we offer.

To learn more about this technology and how it can work for you, visit our website and feel free to contact us with any questions.

Kokusai Quake vibration testing systems are multi-axis systems and they’re able to vibrate and shake products on all three axes, independently and simultaneously and with virtually no crossover! Our Quake systems offer effective product, package, and transportation testing for all industries – for anyone involved in all the different types of product manufacturing industries, plus materials handling, transportation, and more.

Companies using Kokusai’s Quake vibration testing systems can guarantee that their perfect-condition products stay that way throughout the shipping and handling process: from the time they leave the manufacturer until they arrive at consumers’ doorsteps. As well as ensuring that as their products are place under various vibration conditions in use that they won’t break or fail prematurely.

Kokusai offers a complete line of seismic and various transportation simulations and governmental and industry tests on their vibration creation and detection equipment, including:

Quake Vibration Testers

Four Poster Vibration Tester

Tension and Torsion Testers

High Speed Tire and Wheel Uniformity

Engineless Simulators

Wheel Gauging and Wheel Balancing

DynaDrive Flat Belt Testing … and more to come in the near future!

Overall, Kokusai vibration testing systems simulate real-world stresses, and this helps our customers meet the high expectations and demands of today’s consumers. Our specialized equipment does this by simulating “real world” vibrations — shaking, dropping, and other types of movement affecting products during shipment and handling.

We’d be happy to tell you more about our vibration testing systems and to give you an overview of what’s shaking at Kokusai… Give us a call at 317-704-9922, or if you want to see a demonstration of Kokusai Quake equipment in action, watch this video posted on our website.

At Kokusai Inc., we engineer and manufacture machines and controls with highly sensitive measurement systems. We’re known as international leaders in precision balancing, uniformity, and gauging systems and equipment. All of the products we design and manufacture at Kokusai prove our commitment to:

establishing new levels of accuracy and precision

improving efficiency, and

increasing productivity.

We’re proud of this commitment, which has created our success – and also the success of our customers around the world. This is our first blog post, and starting today, we’ll be sharing our success stories and more information about our history with you here. But, for now, here’s a quick summary:

Over the past four-plus decades, Kokusai, Inc. has changed and grown with the industry. In the U.S., we started as solely a sales and service organization in 1981. In 2002, because of changes in the industry, Kokusai USA added full engineering and manufacturing capabilities to our offerings. Soon after that, we also completed the necessary requirements for ISO 9001 and later upgraded to ISO 9001:2008 certification with a design certificate from Smithers Quality Assessments, Inc.

All Kokusai products can be customized for our customers, depending on your needs and specifications. Together, our team of electrical and mechanical engineers offers more than 250 years of experience in engineering design and the manufacturing of machines and specialized testing equipment that utilize highly sensitive controls and measurement systems. (At the core of most of our equipment we design and manufacture is a highly sensitive system for measuring “vibration.” Stay tuned for our next blog post where we’ll talk more about vibration creation and the specialized testing equipment product lines we offer.)

We look forward to sharing more information with you here in our blog in the coming months! But, in the meantime, visit our website to learn more about Kokusai, or call us at 317-704-9922 if you have any questions.